General Electric will acquire the major assets of the
largest American-owned maker of solar equipment, in a move
the solar power industry sees as a major vote of confidence
in the business.

A federal bankruptcy court judge in Delaware yesterday
approved G.E.'s plan to buy the bulk of AstroPower for $15
million in cash and an estimated $3.5 million in debt,
along with other liabilities to be settled when the deal
closes at the end of the month. It would be the most
decisive step yet by G.E. into the so-far unprofitable
business of generating electricity from sunlight, a
technology that G.E. researchers have dabbled in for nearly
half a century.

Previously, G.E. confined its growing interest in this
field, known as photovoltaics, to modest increases in
research spending and the quiet acquisition 18 months ago
of Railway Technology Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Railway
makes a line of solar-powered railroad switches.

G.E. declined yesterday to discuss its plans for
AstroPower. By G.E. standards, the acquisition is a modest
bet. The cost will be but a half-day's earnings for the
company, which had net income last year of $15 billion on
revenue of more than $134 billion. But if the investment
looks minuscule from a Wall Street perspective, it is still
enough to excite many people involved with solar energy.

"It shows we are a mainstream industry, or moving that
way," said Bob Kenedi, general manager of the solar systems
division of Sharp Electronics, an American subsidiary of
the Sharp Corporation of Japan. Sharp has emerged as the
clear market leader in solar power equipment with a sixfold
increase in production since 1999, and it opened its first
American assembly plant, in Memphis, last year.

Worldwide, annual revenue from solar power equipment and
installation, which reached $4.7 billion last year, will
climb to $30.8 billion in 2013, according to a recent
forecast from Clean Edge, a market research firm in San
Francisco.

Solar energy is profitable in numerous niche markets,
including powering satellites and providing electricity for
oil rigs and devices like rural water pumps, road signs and
emergency telephones that cannot be conveniently linked to
power grids. But it is still regarded as too expensive to
be widely adopted for powering homes and businesses now
supplied by utilities. That has left even deep-pocketed
manufacturers like Sharp, Sanyo Electric, the Kyocera
Corporation and the solar subsidiaries of BP and Shell Oil
dependent on governments and power companies to subsidize
sales.

None of the big solar players claim to be profitable and
some former participants remain dismissive about the
potential. "Even if it grows at 20 percent annually, it
will contribute less than 1.5 percent to global energy
needs by 2020," said Tom Cirigliano, a spokesman for Exxon
Mobil, which has estimated that it invested more than half
a billion dollars in solar energy, going back to the
1970's, before withdrawing.

But analysts and solar manufacturers figure G.E. is
responding to signs that rising prices for
hydrocarbon-based fuels and improvements in solar products
and manufacturing technology have laid the foundation for
large-scale producers to finally start making steady
profits - even as major supporters like the Japanese
government and California reduce subsidies to consumers.

"We're in line for our best year yet," said Steven
Westwell, president and chief executive of BP Solar, which
entered the industry 30 years ago and hopes to turn
profitable this year. Demand in California, the leading
United States market, is so strong that state subsidies for
solar equipment purchases could be used up by September, he
said.

Still, in an industry that has frequently disappointed its
advocates, Mr. Westwell and analysts have no trouble
imagining ways that trouble could strike again. By the end
of the year, they said, the industry could be hurt from
overcapacity because so many new solar cell manufacturing
projects are under way. The industry also could be hit by
rising prices for silicon - the basic ingredient in most
photovoltaic cells - because manufacturers of raw materials
have been slow to add capacity. Most of them view supplying
the solar industry as a sideline to making more expensive
products for the computer and consumer electronics
industry.

G.E.'s long-term goals for solar energy would make such
concerns irrelevant. Its recent attention to photovoltaics
grew out of research on light-emitting plastics. Feeding
electricity into such plastics creates light, but
researchers knew that they could also do the reverse - use
light to create electricity. A plastic that was efficient
enough at creating electric current from sunlight might
serve as a much cheaper and more flexible photovoltaic
material than silicon, and become a monster product for
G.E.'s huge plastics business.

As they began to look more closely at developments in the
photovoltaics market, G.E. researchers also realized that
they had expertise to apply to silicon designs that could
pay off even if the plastics project ultimately failed. And
pursuing the technology supported the goal of Jeffrey R.
Immelt, G.E.'s chairman and chief executive, to become a
leader in markets based on renewable-energy technology and
energy efficiency, including wind power, fuel cells,
hydrogen storage and microturbines.

"If you say you are doing renewables, and you are not doing
photovoltaics, you are missing a huge part of it," said
Anil R. Duggal, head of the light-energy conversion
research program at G.E.'s corporate research center in
Schenectady, N.Y.

Renewables have become one of the fastest-growing pieces of
the G.E. portfolio of energy-related businesses, which is
dominated by the company's gas turbine sales and generated
$20 billion in revenue last year. Wind energy in particular
has been a smashing success for G.E., which is based in
Fairfield, Conn. The company won a court auction for
Enron's wind energy subsidiary two years ago, with a $358
million bid; G.E. is forecasting revenue of $1.3 billion
and profit of $100 million from the unit this year.

But compared with the Enron unit, AstroPower, which ran out
of cash after a still unresolved accounting scandal emerged
last year, represents a far flimsier platform for diving
into a new line of business.

As recently as 2001, AstroPower ranked fifth globally in
the production of solar cells and the modules into which
they are assembled, but its rank tumbled to 11th last year,
according to PC News, a trade publication. The company,
based in Newark, Del., lost about $100 million from the
last quarter of 2001 through the end of last year,
according to J. Scott Victor, a partner at SSG Capital
Advisors, the investment bank that helped AstroPower find a
buyer.

"We've been able to sell everything we could make, but we
ran out of money to buy raw materials," Carl H. Young III,
a turnaround specialist who was appointed interim chief
executive last year, said yesterday.

Industry experts are uncertain what G.E. intends to do with
the company. It is unclear how much interest G.E. has in an
advanced thin-film project for making solar cells that
AstroPower had been pursuing but had shut to save cash.
Presumably, that project would be moved to Schenectady if
the company wanted to continue research on it.

Many analysts assume that G.E.'s principal interest is to
keep AstroPower's main production line operating and use it
to gain more solar experience. AstroPower followed the
industry practice of selling most of its products through
solar contractors but it also developed modules sold at
Home Depot and had direct sales relationships with
builders.

"G.E. called us to say they might do this," said Michael V.
McGee, chief executive of Pardee Homes, a company based in
Los Angeles that has built about 100 solar-powered homes in
partnership with AstroPower since 2001. "We're very excited
about it, because we have a great relationship with G.E. on
the appliance side, and we would expect them to bring a
better product to AstroPower."